Ramona: "I was a little bi-curious."
Roxy: "Well I'm a little bi-FURIOUS!"
-Our hero, caught in a love triangle from hell
"Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it in the face."
-Kim Pine, basically speaking for me
"Cera is a superhero for an indecisive generation, which might work if the disjunction were played for satire. But it’s just a disjunction. Scott Pilgrim needs too much help from video games to really save the world."
-David Edelstein, New York Magazine
"An example of attention-deficit filmmaking at both its finest and its most frustrating, "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" blends the styles of videogames, sitcoms and comicbooks for a mostly hollow, high-energy riff on the insecurities of young love."
-Peter DeBruge, Variety.com
"Scott Pilgrim thinks it has found redeeming social importance in all those video games we men of a certain age used to play. Street Fighter II wasn’t just a vacuum for quarters and an excuse to ignore homework and human interaction... it taught us that you have to fight for what you want...or whatever."
-Marty Mapes, MovieHabit.com
Well, what is there to say about this movie? The only thing I can really say is that it's not one of those movies you run across very often. It is simply atypical in every sense of the word, and there are going to be those people who simply don't "get" it. Before we go on, though, it probably needs to be said that Edgar Wright, the director, is also known for his work with the sublime "Shawn of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," so if there's any shortcomings, it's probably less a matter of his skill and more a matter of the sheer nature of the material he was trying to adapt to the big screen.
Even as an adaptation, there are some shortcomings, which become clear simply in the premise. Scott has to defeat seven exes in the space of a two-hour movie, so I would say there were definitely some pacing issues (even considering two of the "evil" exes were twins who fought him at once). It would be like Luke having to take on not just Darth Vader, but also Darth Maul, Palpatine, Boba Fett, General Grievous, and, hell, let's just throw in the Silver Surfer and General Zod too while we're at it.
You'll notice the use of quotes around the word "evil" exes. Well, the fact of the matter is they're not totally built up as menaces. Granted, the movie is viewed through the POV of this new boyfriend of Ramona's, so the concept of "good" and "evil" is probably pretty skewed, but there are some little things that could have been used to better establish them as bad guys--say, for instance, the bit in the graphic novel about the head of the League of Exes keeping his own exes brainwashed and imprisoned. As well as his tendency to emotionally abuse others. Including the girl we end up spending 2 hours getting to know
Michael Cera probably isn't the ideal hero in any situation, but he manages to play the title character as the sort of "manchild" we all know and...frankly, kind of hate. The point, of course, is that he's supposed to grow into the role of Ramona's "savior," not unlike Luke Skywalker or Buffy. Or, say, Christian Bale and Daniel Craig's green-behind-the-ears takes on Batman and Bond, respectively. He also works as a sort of stand-in for the audience, for anyone who's ever had to deal with exes--their own or anyone else's, for that matter.
The whole video game motif...theme...points system...er, whatever you want to call it...takes some getting used to. The beginning uses a lot of subtitles along the lines of...God knows which game...to point out Scott's lives, his friends, their names, his girlfriends, their exes, his exes, the bathroom, the medicine in the bathroom, toilet up, toilet down, how much piss he has left in his system...it just took getting used to. It was hard not to feel detached, as they go through the motions of introducing this girl he's apparently dating in high school, introducing Ramona, introducing her friends.
A lot of this, again, has to do with the simple problem of pacing. The whole video game motif becomes less intrusive once it's confined to the "boss" fights with the League of Exes, but there's nothing to make us care about Scott or Ramona or any of the love triangle even after the film gets going. The exes, our main antagonists, simply pop up out of nowhere, which adds to the tongue-in-cheek humor of the film, but also makes it difficult to develop any of them. And the chemistry between our love birds is nonexistent; one could say this is simply because it's not "that kind" of movie, but a lot of this is related to Ramona being a stand-in for the girl of our dreams rather than someone we can remotely relate to, and Scott Pilgrim himself just not being a great guy, or a good guy, or even a likable guy.
So overall, is "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" a good movie? Well, it's pockmarked with flaws, including the pacing, the chemistry, and the fact that this reviewer is simply shut out of the underlying video game universe they're in. I wouldn't call it a bad movie, because beneath the trappings of the evil exes, saving the girl, the Swords of Self-Respect, the bad guys bursting into coins, and the sense of a giant Sue-fic put into movie form, it's a story many of us can relate to. It's more of a potentially good movie that makes me want to punch it in the face at times.
Note: So, this Brewsky, he's a contributor and movie reviewer...what does that mean? What does that even mean, "contributor"? What is he "contributing" to? He...his face is a contributor. That's right, I said it.
No comments:
Post a Comment